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tylerjfuqua 's review for:
James
by Percival Everett
I’ve gone back and forth a lot on how I want to rate this. I think ultimately I’d land somewhere in the 3.5 star range.
I deeply respect what Everett set out to do with this novel - a bold reclamation of identity and voice from a character that was famously flattened.
It is a brilliant premise and a lot of it is beautifully written.
The reason it loses stars is that the vehicle for the narrative didn’t resonate with me on several levels. The dialogue often felt stilted and overly performative. The pacing was uneven, with moments of dense introspection giving way to rushed or implausible plot turns. The world itself felt more like a constructed allegory orbiting James than a lived-in place — characters and events appeared for a page or two, served their symbolic purpose, and disappeared without weight. Even James, for all his complexity, didn’t seem to grow meaningfully over the course of the novel. And the ending — particularly the final scene — struck me as both tropey and dramatically implausible, undermining what should have been a moment of hard-earned power.
I know this will resonate more fully for others — especially those more steeped in Twain’s original — but for me, the execution too often fell short of the novel’s enormous potential.
I deeply respect what Everett set out to do with this novel - a bold reclamation of identity and voice from a character that was famously flattened.
It is a brilliant premise and a lot of it is beautifully written.
The reason it loses stars is that the vehicle for the narrative didn’t resonate with me on several levels. The dialogue often felt stilted and overly performative. The pacing was uneven, with moments of dense introspection giving way to rushed or implausible plot turns. The world itself felt more like a constructed allegory orbiting James than a lived-in place — characters and events appeared for a page or two, served their symbolic purpose, and disappeared without weight. Even James, for all his complexity, didn’t seem to grow meaningfully over the course of the novel. And the ending — particularly the final scene — struck me as both tropey and dramatically implausible, undermining what should have been a moment of hard-earned power.
I know this will resonate more fully for others — especially those more steeped in Twain’s original — but for me, the execution too often fell short of the novel’s enormous potential.